Sweet Corn Cereal Milk™ Ice Cream Pie
One summer we had the idea of putting a frozen ice cream pie on the menu at Ssäm Bar. It would be sliced and stored in the freezer, so all the cooks had to do was get it on a plate, put some fruit on top of it, and—booya!—send it out to the table. Not a lot of work for the already-slammed savory cook. But that was during the time when we were operating out of a portion of the tiny, tiny basement at Ko, and there wasn’t any extra real estate for a professional ice cream machine. So we took a little time to think about how we could cheat the process a little—basically, we needed to get rid of the churning while freezing. We ended up finding that our sweet corn cereal milk was the milk that took to the task the best—the freeze-dried corn and Cap’n Crunch combo has this intense corn pudding flavor. It’s so tasty it can be diluted with a lot of fatty, bland cream and still pack a punch of corn flavor. The high proportion of cream, fortified with the starch from the cereal and corn, creates an “ice cream” that freezes soft but hard, a texture kind of like Häagen-Dazs. Because it gets loose and pourable as it defrosts, the “ice cream” is best for molded frozen uses, like this ice cream pie, or poured into, say, Popsicle molds to make ice cream pops. Once we had this crazy intense corn ice cream, we set to making a crust corny enough to match it. That process led us down the road to developing our corn cookie, which is the sleeper of all the Milk Bar cookies. It looks so harmless, so plain, so yellow, so un-cookie-like. It’s also my grandma’s favorite. Her house is surrounded by cornfields, so she’s my authority.
Recipe information
Yield
Makes 1 (10¿inch) pie; serves 8 to 10
Ingredients
Preparation
Step 1
Put the corn cookies in the food processor and pulse it on and off until the cookies are crumbled into bright yellow sand. (If you don’t have a food processor, you can fake it till you make it and crumble the corn cookies diligently with your hands into a bowl.)
Step 2
In a bowl, knead the butter and ground cookie mixture by hand until it is moist enough to form a ball. If it is not moist enough to do so, melt an additional 14 g (1 tablespoon) butter and knead it in.
Step 3
Using your fingers and the palms of your hands, press the corn cookie crust firmly into a 10-inch pie plate. Make sure the bottom and the walls of the pie plate are evenly covered. Wrapped in plastic, the crust can be frozen for up to 2 weeks.
Step 4
Use a spatula to scrape and spread the cereal milk “ice cream” filling into the pie shell. Tap the filled pie against the surface of the counter to even the filling. Freeze the pie for at least 3 hours, or until the “ice cream” is frozen and set hard enough to cut and serve. If you’re saving your slices of heaven for later, you can freeze the ice cream pie, wrapped in plastic, for up to 2 weeks.
Notes
Step 5
Garnish slices of the pie with local fruit of the season. At Ssäm Bar, we macerate a pint of fresh Tristar strawberries (page 214) with a tablespoon of sugar, a very tiny pinch of salt, and 1/2 teaspoon rice wine vinegar and spoon over the pie slices.
